Well, one way to think about it is that they know with 100% certainty that an iPad version of Instagram would do well. However by putting out an iPad app, they wouldn't really increase people's total usage of Instagram that much. There's only so much Instagram that people can fit into their lives realistically.
One thing that the good folks at Instagram HQ have is time, and resources. They are owned by a big, money making entity in Facebook. So what makes sense is for them to optimize for learning. Hyperlapse is an experiment that tries to teach people a new behavior. If this behavior sticks, then Facebook would effectively own that behavior (head start through network effects, branding, etc).
In the long term view of the company, it's advantageous to be able to leverage NEW behaviors. That's how Facebook (a.k.a Instagram) will be able to insert itself into more parts of your life than simply trying to maximize the lone part of your life it occupies. Once a new part of your life is found to be occupied, they can then transition into maximizing the time spent in that new part.
Like this, Facebook trades depth for breadth, but not really because Instagram as it exists is deep enough already. They know that an iPad App is of marginal value, but a separate app experimenting with an entirely new behavior has huge upside potential if it takes off, one that they can continue to add depth to afterwards. So that's what they went with.
Except that there's no point in ever adding depth to anything, because once you're there, your original argument takes over and it's time to start taking over a new part of your life instead of adding depth. And that, as they say, is why we can't have nice things.
When Instagram was first released, it was a necessarily shallow product. They needed to put out an MVP to see if it was a product people wanted and if it was an implementation that would stick.
Once it started taking off, they realized they needed to add depth to their product. Depth usually means features but not always. So stuff like editing, more photo editing tools, more filters.
It's hard to appreciate all the depth they've added to the product over the years. Even then, they're probably unique in that they had to spend A LOT of their time scaling but if they didn't have as many scaling issues then I bet we would have gotten some of this depth much earlier in Instagram's life.
Remember, Instagram started off as a super simple app with maybe 8 or so filters. Now you have tons of filters, multiple cropping options, panning, colorations, etc etc. It can now almost go toe to toe with most of the dedicated photo editing apps in the App Store. People used to go to another app to do more advanced editing and then come back to Instagram to maybe drop a filter on top and share with their friends. Even some styles of filters weren't available on Instagram so people used 3rd party apps just for a particular filter.
Today, people do all of this inside the app itself, effectively cutting out those third parties that enjoyed a lot of success during the early days of the app store. Now that Instagram has sufficient depth, users don't have to get kicked out to 3rd parties for most of their editing needs, even some of the more advanced actions. This is what I define as "sufficient" depth.
Once sufficient depth is achieved, they can buy some time to focus on other things (like the Hyperlapse experiment). How do you know if a product has reached this mystical "sufficient depth"?
One thing that the good folks at Instagram HQ have is time, and resources. They are owned by a big, money making entity in Facebook. So what makes sense is for them to optimize for learning. Hyperlapse is an experiment that tries to teach people a new behavior. If this behavior sticks, then Facebook would effectively own that behavior (head start through network effects, branding, etc).
In the long term view of the company, it's advantageous to be able to leverage NEW behaviors. That's how Facebook (a.k.a Instagram) will be able to insert itself into more parts of your life than simply trying to maximize the lone part of your life it occupies. Once a new part of your life is found to be occupied, they can then transition into maximizing the time spent in that new part.
Like this, Facebook trades depth for breadth, but not really because Instagram as it exists is deep enough already. They know that an iPad App is of marginal value, but a separate app experimenting with an entirely new behavior has huge upside potential if it takes off, one that they can continue to add depth to afterwards. So that's what they went with.